amfAR Ramps Up Investment in HIV Cure Research

NEW YORK (February 10, 2012)—amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS
Research on Friday announced four new grants to leading researchers from around
the world in the Foundation’s most competitive round of HIV cure grants to
date.

Each grant will provide significant support over two years to
teams working on cure-focused research at the California Institute of
Technology; Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH; Ghent University
Hospital in Ghent, Belgium; and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

One project is led by Dr. David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate
and professor at Caltech who is directing his attention and efforts toward curing
HIV. Dr. Baltimore was awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine
for his discovery of reverse transcriptase, which enabled the development of
reverse transcriptase inhibitors—drugs that form the cornerstone of HIV
treatment today. His amfAR-funded project seeks to address an enduring
controversy in the cure field: whether, and how, HIV continues to replicate
even when a patient has an undetectable viral load. The answer to this question
will fundamentally determine which processes and parts of the anatomy must be
targeted to cure HIV infection.

“There have been many
new findings as interest in HIV cure research has grown during the past few
years, and amfAR is uniquely poised to help explain and extend those findings
and apply them to curing HIV,” said amfAR Vice President and Director of
Research Rowena Johnston, who also oversees amfAR’s cure research consortium. “We’re
excited to see what each of our four teams can do when our funding meets their
considerable talents.”

The three other teams will investigate a newly discovered
type of cell that may constitute a prime reservoir for HIV persistence; the
mechanisms through which such persistence is established and may be perturbed;
and a cutting-edge methodology for measuring the size of this reservoir, a tool
that could help scientists assess the impact of interventions aimed at reducing
its size and thus curing HIV.

“Several of these projects wouldn’t have been possible even
a year ago,” Johnston said. “We are witnessing an exponential growth in our
understanding of the obstacles standing in the way of a cure. amfAR has the
flexibility to respond in real time to the emerging opportunities in the field
of cure research.”

About 60 percent of amfAR’s research grants are dedicated to
cure-specific projects around the world.

“At a time when medical research funding, like many other
types of funding, is under attack, amfAR is pleased to be able to fund this
important work,” said amfAR CEO Kevin Robert Frost. “We’re proud to be at the
forefront of the cure research field and strongly believe that, given the right
resources and the political will, we can and will find a cure for HIV/AIDS.”

About amfAR

amfAR, The Foundation for
AIDS Research, is one of the world’s leading nonprofit organizations dedicated
to the support of AIDS research, HIV prevention, treatment education, and the
advocacy of sound AIDS-related public policy. Since 1985, amfAR has invested
nearly $366 million in its programs and has awarded grants to more than 2,000
research teams worldwide.

David Baltimore,
Ph.D.California Institute
of Technology, Pasadena, CA$249,600Ongoing replication
in anatomical niches in the face of ART: The great majority of virus in an
infected person resides within tissues, not blood, and yet far less is known
about how viral transmission, as well as persistence, occurs in these areas.
Dr. Baltimore hypothesizes that in tissues with a dense concentration of cells
that are susceptible to HIV infection, virus may be passed directly from an
infected cell to an uninfected target cell without traversing the space between
cells. Under these circumstances, antiretroviral therapy (ART) may be less
efficient at preventing replication of the virus. His studies will contribute
to our understanding of the potential and limitations of ART to clear
persistent reservoirs of virus and further our understanding of barriers to a
cure for HIV.

Jonathan Karn, Ph.D.Case Western Reserve
University, Cleveland, OH$250,000Identification of
cellular factors required to maintain HIV latency: When HIV infects a cell,
it usually leads to production of new viruses. In a very small number of cases,
however, the virus inserts itself into the human DNA and becomes dormant, or
latent, resulting in the inability of antiretroviral therapy to target the
virus. Dr. Karn will scan libraries of short stretches of host cell RNA to
determine which proteins and other factors in cells are required to establish
latent infection. Understanding these factors, and interactions between them,
will point towards ways in which latent infection can be prevented or reversed,
and thus bring us closer to a cure for HIV.

Mathias Lichterfeld,
M.D., Ph.D.Massachusetts General
Hospital, Boston, MA$250,000T memory stem cells:
a new cellular reservoir for HIV-1: CD4 T cells are the major source of
virus that persists despite antiretroviral therapy (ART). Several subsets of
these cells have been identified as particularly important reservoirs. Dr.
Lichterfeld and colleagues will investigate whether a newly discovered subset
of CD4 T cells that have properties similar to stem cells might serve as the
main site of viral persistence as well as a source of virus that re-emerges
when ART is stopped. They will also test whether pharmaceutical agents that
target these cells specifically might serve as a novel therapy to purge these
cellular reservoirs of virus and thus form part of a strategy to cure HIV
infection.

Linos
Vanderkerckhove, M.D., Ph.D.Ghent University
Hospital, Ghent, Belgium$249,600Size of the HIV
reservoir and ongoing replication in defined patient cohorts: As
researchers pursue the goal of curing HIV, they will require new tools that can
measure decreases in levels of virus that are already at the limit of detection
with the most sensitive tests available today. Dr. Vanderkerckhove plans to
develop a new test that combines and optimizes several experimental lab assays.
His test will simultaneously indicate the size of the latent reservoir of HIV,
the extent to which virus continues to replicate while the patient is on
antiretroviral therapy, and the precise stretches of DNA into which the virus
inserts itself. He will then test blood and tissues from patients on or off
antiretroviral therapy, to compare the behavior of the reservoir under these
different conditions.